


fade in on a girl

by waketosleep



Series: Black Widow: The Movie I'm Not Writing [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Assassins & Hitmen, Gen, Origin Story, bildungsroman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-23
Updated: 2012-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 21:14:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/waketosleep/pseuds/waketosleep
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The prevalence of sexual cannibalism gives several species of spider in the genus <i>Latrodectus</i> the colorful common name "black widow". However, the female does not always kill and eat the male.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fade in on a girl

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who saw Avengers a second time? That's right, it was me. And since I don't get to write the screenplay for Black Widow I did this instead.

Everyone is very large compared to her. Their faces are dim. "You will grow up big and strong, Natalia." A hand lands on her head and she wants to bite it but she's scared.

"That's not my name."

"Of course it's your name. She doesn't know her own name, imagine that. Run along now, Granny there has some food for you."

They call her Natasha all the time. But they feed her every single day, too, so she goes along with it.

***

She is twelve and has the reflexes of a cat, from training and from dodging the spoons Granny will throw when she gets pissed off. Granny has a short temper and Natasha is always on the wrong side of it. She's getting tall, taller, and all of the running around and lifting heavy things (buckets full of water to scrub the floors and don't spill any or you'll get whipped across the ass with one of those spoons; round metal weights that Uncle Ivan makes her carry across the room and back for no reason) are starting to show on her body as hard muscles.

Uncle Ivan is working her harder than ever, sparring and running miles and miles and learning how to use a knife, finally. She's the first one to learn and the other girls watch enviously instead of hitting the punching bags like they're supposed to. "You will be great," he says, and she beams when his hand rests on her hair, and she feels like a flower reaching for the sun.

In the fall a woman arrives, long and thin and graceful and with eyes like steel knives. She and Uncle Ivan greet each other as Comrade and Granny gives her a look up and down like she's thinking of throwing a spoon. Natasha would like to see that happen but it doesn't. Uncle Ivan presents Natasha and Sveta, who is the same size as her and the only one Natasha can spar with without someone getting really hurt. The woman looks them both over like livestock and then nods at Natasha. "I'll take her for now."

And they leave. She gets to take a bag. She's learned not to ask where they're going or why she has to leave. Honestly she doesn't really care.

They go to a city. The woman says that it's called Leningrad. Natasha looks out the windows of the train as they pass buildings and people and cars and can't take it all in.

"It's not Siberia," says the woman, sounding amused. That's an obvious fucking statement.

Her name is Mme. Romanova, she says, and Natasha's training begins when Mme. Romanova leads her into a large, empty room in her house which has an entire wall of mirrors. Natasha looks small in them, and she stares at herself.

"Your body is a weapon," says Mme. Romanova.

Natasha knows this. She once broke Rita's arm by mistake.

"Not in the way you are probably thinking. You haven't even realized yet what it is you can do."

And she gets something from the corner of the room and holds it out; Natasha doesn't know what she was expecting Mme. Romanova to hand her but it certainly wasn't ballet shoes.

"Unconscious grace is the hardest to achieve," says Mme. Romanova. "Let's get started."

***

Natasha doesn't remember any of her childhood, not correctly. Sometimes she wakes up and has distant impressions of electric shocks and the pinch of needles, or gasps awake flailing because she is convinced her head is submerged in a bucket of icy water. But she doesn't remember growing up in Red Room. She knows she did; she knows she wasn't really a teenage ballerina before the GRU recruited her, that her dear Uncle Ivan didn't really raise her alone in Leningrad before getting her into a ballet company. Dear Uncle Ivan probably never existed. These are details of a life that Red Room put in her head. She can't get them out. They live in there, memories that feel like hers but aren't (she knows because she found her files; so many things had a price once the Soviet Union collapsed) and they sit alongside a screaming voice that calls them all lies and gets louder all the time.

It's a difficult mental balance, getting through the day with this going on in your brain. Vodka helps.

***

What Natasha can remember is the work. She's been to every major city in Europe, half of South America. Tokyo. Hong Kong. New York. Mumbai. She's flown first class on more passports than she can count. There's always work to be done. Men with secrets they don't want to share.

But Natasha's always been very convincing on behalf of the motherland.

She finds her mark and she puts on her warpaint (concealer, foundation, mascara, liner, gloss, never overdo it) and she puts on her armour (silk doesn't tear easily which is sometimes good and sometimes not so good) and she goes into battle with the flutter of her eyelashes, the toss of her curls, the turn of her shoulder. Her body is a weapon. It's slightly disgusting how predictably it works, how easily she gets them where she wants them, nice and vulnerable, and then they tell her everything.

Usually they do. Sometimes they need help remembering. The reinforced steel hairpins and the Glock in her handbag (and the strength of a good length of silk) are all the backup she tends to need. She kills most of them anyway when she's done with them, so it doesn't matter much if she ruins them a little bit first.

Her codename is Чёрная вдова. Somebody thought they were really clever.

Sometimes she gets downtime, in some hotel room someplace, after she's washed the blood off and fixed her makeup and made her dead drop, and she remembers she doesn't have any hobbies so she grabs something slinky or a pair of jeans and goes out and finds somebody to fuck instead of kill. It's that or find a liquor store and people can drown in their own vomit. She's witnessed it herself, and can't quite figure out whether it's more or less distressing than getting blood all over the walls. Anyway, people who drink alone are alcoholics. Better to go to the club and find someone to buy it for her glass by glass, fuck them sweatily in a quiet corner or their hotel room and slip back to hers later with barely enough time to shower before extraction. The timing is important, though, because if she hangs around too long she might start talking to them. Or kill them.

She hates having downtime.

***

The long assignments are strange. She thinks she hates them. She isn't sure. She wonders if Natalie Rushman and Nancy Reeves and Claire Marie Durand and Milena Sobczak are people she should wish she was. She's played models and teachers and personal assistants and girls-next-door and dominatrixes but they're all costumes and none of them feel as real to her as the flex of a garrote in her hands or the weight of a gun pressing into her palm.

Those long hauls are unpleasant to wrap up, too. It's one thing to kill a lecherous old businessman but it's another entirely when you also have to dispatch his wife and two children and jesus christ, sometimes even the cat, and make it look like an accident afterwards. The wives tend to require some brutality on Natasha's part; they don't always underestimate her so easily. When she's cleaning up one of those jobs, she wonders how families are a threat to Russia and how this fits into her patriotic duty. Maybe families are dangerous.

She mostly just tries not to think about it too hard. She doesn't have to do those jobs all the time.

She's on a different kind of long assignment in Beirut, with a partner for a change, playing the girlfriend and the backup for Mikhail, another GRU agent who she feels is doing a bullshit job of pretending to be an arms dealer. When they met in Moscow, he looked her up and down with an expression on his face like he thought someone was playing a joke-- _this girl_ was going to back him up?--but her reputation at the agency precedes her and he kept his mouth shut. Whether his life is worth defending or not, this assignment has been a boring two weeks so far with no sign of letting up; Natasha's almost decided to pretend it's a holiday.

The boredom is what makes her let her guard down; it's such a rookie mistake. She's ditched Mikhail for the afternoon and is going for a walk in the sun, and she turns a corner to head to the flea market and there he is, he's already gotten the drop on her. She freezes. He's seven feet away from her. He's got a military haircut, maybe a little longish, black body armour, an American issue sidearm and an honest to god quiver of arrows on his back. He's built, too. American Special Forces, one of those fancy snipers, she decides. Snipers can be so fucking ridiculous.

"Natalia Romanoff?" His voice is husky; she likes it. He also fucked up her last name. Americans. Still, she kind of likes the sound of a masculine name. It makes her feel kind of butch. She's never been butch.

"Pardon?" she says in her best American accent. "Look, I think you've got me confused--"

He cuts her off with just a grin. "Nope," he says. "I don't think I do. Natalia Romanoff, Russian assassin, codenamed Black Widow. Wanted by Interpol _and_ the CIA. That's you."

She's got both of her Glock 26s in her bag, a short knife strapped to her thigh under her skirt, and she's wearing one of the giant bracelets that contain the stun guns she likes to call her Widow's Bite. Her only point of egress is behind her. Or through him. Natasha shifts her weight, cants her hips, and crosses her arms, which makes her breasts stand out and makes her seem defenseless besides. "That's quite an accusation," she says, lowering her chin just a little and looking up at him. "Do I look like an assassin to you? I'm just on my way to buy cheap jewelry."

"Stay where you are," he says casually, like he's commenting on the weather. "And put your hands down by your sides. Drop that bag, please."

She looks at his hand, hanging loose only a few inches from grabbing his sidearm, and complies. When he motions for it, she kicks the bag to him across the pavement. This is going to take quite a reassessment.

"Subcompacts?" he says when he digs into her bag and pulls out her Glocks. "This is what you use?"

Those and whatever else she can get her hands on; Natasha likes improvising. "They shoot people in the head just fine," she says. "I don't like to overcompensate."

He huffs a laugh but he's still watching her, goddammit. If this keeps up she's going to start respecting him. "I was sent here to take you out," he says, more seriously.

"And you like a personal touch?"

"I really don't. I've been watching you and I decided to try and turn you instead."

She's supposed to ask him why. She stares at him silently.

He's apparently unbothered. "Defect to the US. Come work for my organization. Stop killing kids."

She holds back the flinch and stays silent.

"How much do you know about Red Room?" he ventures. "We have stuff on them."

"What's behind door number two?" Natasha asks blandly.

"I take you out. You won't know when and you'll never see me but I promise it'll be fast. It's up to you. But this doesn't end with you going back to Russia."

She relaxes unaccountably at that; she almost says 'Yes, do it, kill me,' thinks it might be nice not to exist anymore, but his promise that she won't see him coming holds her tongue. Cocky bastard but he's probably telling the truth, is probably that good.

And she might actually like to see him again.

The sun beats down where they're standing and sweat is trickling down her spine. He waits.

She opens her mouth, prepared to say, "Shoot me then," but what actually comes out is, "I always really liked New York."

He grins again. "You're in luck."

"What's your name, anyway?" she asks.

"What's yours?" he counters. He's got her there.

"Just call me Natasha." It's good enough. It's worked so far. Names are something other people give you.

"I'm Clint," he says, and finally comes close to give back her bag. Her Glocks are back inside it.

"Do you want me to disarm?" she asks. She doesn't know how this defection thing works aside from the part where someone catches up to you later and strangles you in your car.

"If it makes you feel better," says Clint with a shrug, leading the way down the street. He's letting her have her guns and knife because he knows as well as she does that if he's close enough to touch, she doesn't need any of her own weapons to take him down. They're going to play this thing on trust, apparently.

Natasha decides she likes him.

"Let's get it in gear; I've got a couple of hours of being yelled at by my boss to look forward to," he says over his shoulder.

"I guess life is tough as a white knight," Natasha jokes.

He arches an eyebrow at her. "Do you need one of those?"

"Of course not," she says. But she supposes she can appreciate when she gets one anyway.

 

THE END


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